Distant Blood (3 page)

Sister returned to the table, toying with her blonde pony-tail and smiling like the grin had been pasted on with fancy glue. She sat down next to Bob Don and squeezed his arm in affection. I tried not to choke on my pudding.

“I think this reunion idea is just
wonderful,”
Sister purred. “Bob Don, of course you should get Jordan to go. Far be it from me to suggest otherwise. And Jordy, it's just
absolutely necessary that you bond with your Goertz kin-folk. After all, they're your people, too.”

“Are y'all nipping cooking sherry back there?” I craned my neck for a better view into the kitchen. Candace ducked out of sight, presumably to go flour a chicken for frying. I suspected my butt'd been dusted as well. I narrowed my gaze at Sister, who replied with a cherubic smile. (The last angel to sport that grin was Lucifer immediately before he took the down elevator.)

“Jordy, your hypersuspicious mind is certainly one of your least attractive assets.” Sister sniffed. She patted Bob Don's arm.
“I
know that I've not always been—entirely kind to you, Bob Don. I'm sorry. I'm gonna work on that.”

He patted her arm back and gave her his warm smile. “I appreciate that, Arlene. After all, we're all family now.”

“And it's so important for us to keep that truth foremost in our minds,” Sister concurred. She sounded like a United Nations ambassador working the floor.

“I believe I've had enough sugar for today,” I said, clunking my spoon in my scraped-clean pudding bowl. I'd hoped for a summit between Sister and Bob Don, but this smacked of backdoor diplomacy.

“So when do you leave?” Sister asked brightly.

“Not soon enough for you, apparently,” I teased. “Would you like to go pack my bags for me?”

“One just can't ignore opportunities like this, Jordy,” Sister said, then coughed with a sidelong glance at Bob Don. “I mean—a chance to meet your long-lost family.”

“Or a chance to escape from your currently existing relatives,” I parried. Sister has never advocated sudden mood swings. I, of course, relegated her attempt at detente with Bob Don to consideration of my long-wounded feelings.

More fool I.

THE FIRST LETTER ARRIVED IN EARLY JUNE. IT
lay nestled, like a snake in high grass, among the inevitable bills, a long, funny letter from my college roommate now living in Nashville, and a men's-health magazine brimming with advice I gleefully ignore. I thought at first it was just a card of some sort, noting only the Corpus Christi postmark and wondering who the hell did I know down on the coast.

I sat at the kitchen table, still laughing from my friend's letter, and pulled the card out of the envelope. I dropped it immediately when I saw the blood.

A dried
X
of crimson gore splattered the front, obscuring a cartoon cat's knowing leer. The envelope fell nervelessly from my hands. My stomach churned.

I gulped a couple of long, steadying breaths, then retrieved a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer. Using them, I pried the card open—the paper resisted for a moment, because the blood gummed the edges closed. Redness lined the missive, like the dark signature of the devil. I saw first the preprinted salutation on the card:
THINKING ONLY OF YOU.
A scarlet spatter scored the wish. On the other side of the card, letters cut from a magazine spelled out a cheerless message:

I sat for a long while, breathing through my mouth, reading the hateful words again. Cursive, dainty letters formed the
PROVE
and they looked incongruous in the hurtful context. Bile rose in my throat, along with a hard, burning anger. I balled my hand into a fist.

Stay away bastard.

The phone rang, jarring me out of my reverie. I scooped the receiver up with a shaking hand. “Hello?” My own voice sounded dank and rheumy, as if I'd just surfaced from some deep darkness.

“Hey, son, how you?” Bob Don's voice revved along, probably fresh from having closed a sweet deal on a fine preowned vehicle. “Hadn't talked to you in a couple of days and I missed you. What's up?”

I swallowed hard during his flurry of words. My heart pounded in my chest, and when I spoke, my voice cracked on my first assurance that I was well. “Doing fine. How are you?”

He regaled me with a funny story about one of his salesmen that normally would have had me laughing com-panionably. Instead I forced a weak titter. He asked about Mama and I answered I'd been out to the horse farm and she was well. The dance of words, meaningless to me at the moment, continued until I could stand it no more.

“Bob Don, let me ask you a question. Did you tell the rest of your family about my coming to this reunion next month?”

“Oh, sure, son. I weren't hardly gonna surprise them with you and make everybody uncomfortable. I told Uncle Mutt I was bringing you, and my sister Sass, and I'm sure they've informed the rest of the folks. You're big news to the Goertzes. Everybody's real eager to meet you.”

“I see.” I stared at the blood-smirched card. Someone had not taken the news of my arrival kindly.

“That's all right, isn't it?” Bob Don sounded concerned. “Son?”

“Yes, of course it is. I just wondered.”

“Well, I'm so looking forward to the reunion. I can't wait to show off my boy.”

Pleasure and pride laced his voice, and I smiled despite
myself. I glanced back on the obscenity on the kitchen table. “I'm looking forward to meeting them, Bob Don.”

We made small talk for a while, and he invited Candace and me to dinner the following Friday night. I hung up the phone and turned back toward the table.

I resisted the urge to destroy the card. I got my camera, snapped a couple of pictures of the perverse mail, and carefully slid the card into a plastic Baggie. Telling Bob Don would upset him no end, and I felt furious at the idea of being warned off the reunion by someone so cowardly they veiled their hate in blood and anonymous threats. I stored the card carefully in an antique wooden box in my room, loath to eye it again. I stared down at the shut box and imagined the evil on the other side made the carved lid tremble, ever so slightly.

I wondered who might hate me so, sight unseen.

Two weeks later, rich hickory smoke perfumed the air as Bob Don flipped steaks on his backyard grill. Gretchen had flown on her broom to Brenham to visit her aunt and Can-dace was having dinner with her folks. We were bache-loring dinner together, but I had scant appetite for blood-rare steak and a loaded, buttery baked potato, fluffed with salt and pepper. My secret admirer had mailed me good wishes again.

The second bit of correspondence was more direct in its threat. He or she had opted for another mass-market greeting card, the kind that women buy for other women on birthdays, dripping with sexual innuendo. A handsome blond fellow leaned against a column, bare belly rippling with muscle, jeans faded and strategically torn. Vanilla frosting was lightly smeared across his well-defined chest and gut and his puckered lips held a small, lit candle. The inside, preprinted message said
HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT

IT, TOO. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

The outward message, though, was of greater interest. The man's visage had been carefully sliced in an
X
with a razor, and inside my well-wisher had pasted in stolen script:

Cold chilled my bones. I could never be handsome enough to be a model, but the fellow on the card was lanky, a thick-haired blond, and green-eyed—like me. I couldn't imagine that the hate-mailer had gotten lucky in choosing a countenance and coloring like my own. And the vandalism on the card had been minutely done, careful to preserve some semblance of the model's face.

This person knew what I looked like.

Thickness coated my throat. My glance had gone to my windows, my door. Were they watching me now? Did they know my face, or was it a lucky guess based on Bob Don's own looks? I checked again for the postmark—this time it was Beaumont, much further up the long, curving Texas coast from Corpus Christi. So my admirer traveled, or had an accomplice. I sealed the second harassing missive in another Baggie and stored it with the first. And spent a long, sleepless night, listening to Candace's soft breathing in the darkness.

I hadn't told a soul.

Now, watching Bob Don cheerfully grill dinner, the soft voice of the Rangers baseball announcer chronicling a home game, the chirp of crickets in the trees, the hate felt far away. I sipped at my Shiner Bock and listened to the soporific drone of the bugs, singing away their short lives.

“Earth to Jordan,” Bob Don boomed out after I'd been idling moments away in my own world. I looked up at him with surprise.

“Something's got you out of gear, son. The Rangers ain't losing that badly.”

I smiled.
Son.
Despite my ambivalence about Bob Don as a parent, I have to admit the endearment had a nice ring. When my father died from his bout with cancer and my mother forgot who I was, I'd thought
son
would be a word dropped from usage in connection with me. But here was
Bob Don, ready to pick up the reins. Ready to love me like a father, like the one I'd lost. I stood suddenly and walked through the smoke wafting from the grill.

“You and Candace crossways?” he asked my back.

“No.” How, how to do this? “I need to ask you a question. Is anyone in your family considered—dangerous?”

“Good Lord.” He blinked at me with honest surprise. “What on earth would make you ask such a thing?”

I felt torn about revealing the poison-pen letters. Part of me wanted him to know, to tell me I didn't have to go to the reunion, that he'd find out who was terrorizing me. Another half of me wanted to entirely ignore the epistles, not give in to the foul bullying they represented. But I was swimming into unknown waters here, and I needed to know where the sharks lay.

I ran my tongue along my lips. “I just would like for you to answer the question, Bob Don.”

“I will, when I know why you're asking.” He swallowed another long swig from his Shiner longneck.

“I'm just wondering if everyone in your family is going to be delighted by my presence. There could be some resentment against me. After all, I'm somewhat of an unwelcome addition.”

“Why unwelcome? They're just going to love you—”

“If you say so,” I interrupted, cutting off his extrovert's flow of words and tasting my beer. I'd been giving some thought as to why I—as the newest member of the Goertz family—might merit vituperative messages. And I'd concocted a theory. “Uncle Mutt's rich, right?”

I asked this while Bob Don was in mid-gulp and he nodded his assent. “Yeah, rolling in it.”

“Are we talking millions here?”

“Mutt's probably worth about ten million or so.”

Ten million.
No wonder someone didn't want another claimant to the family fortune around.

“And he's in good health? Not expected to kick off anytime soon?”

Bob Don gave me a long, measuring stare. “I don't like where this conversation's heading. I hope you want to go to
meet my family because it matters to us both, not to hit Uncle Mutt up for cash or get on the beneficiary list.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” I hemmed. “Not at all, Bob Don. It just occurs to me that some of your relatives might not be overly thrilled at another potential heir.”

He didn't answer me immediately, the smoke from the grill framing his face in the dusky light. He turned and ministered over the steaks, piling the two thick cuts onto a plate. “Nearly let these burn,” he muttered to himself. “And why don't we eat out here? It's a nice evening and the mosquitoes ain't so bad.” In counterpoint to this comment, the blue haze of his bug zapper brightened and an electric hiss announced the demise of another of our bloodsucking friends. “Why don't you get the taters?” he asked.

I went back inside, wondering why he was dodging my question. I fetched the warming potatoes from the oven, sliced them open in a cloud of fragrant steam, and slathered them with butter, sour cream, and chives. I retrieved the salad I'd made earlier from the fridge, grabbed a bottle of ranch dressing, and piled all on a tray, along with plates and silverware.

When I returned to the patio, Bob Don was staring toward the purplish horizon, watching the dying light play along the branches of the loblolly pines and the live oaks that dotted his expansive backyard. The air felt warm and wet from an afternoon shower, but we're tough about humidity in Texas. He didn't even glance back at me when I began to unload the fixings.

“I hope you're hungry, Bob Don,” I began, '”cause we sure got us a mess of food here. I'm hiking my cholesterol just looking at it.”

He turned to me then and I could see an alien sadness coloring his face. I say alien because I'm not sure I could ever understand the emotions that painted that particular expression. He looked like a man who's gotten every gold piece in creation, only to see it all turn to brass in one dreadful second. I turned back to setting the table.